Ad Tech Tuesday – Shazam

26th April 2016

By Kristoffer Hammer, Head of Business Development, Clearcast

Clearcast is fortunate enough to be approached by tech companies that can help do new and amazing things to audio-visual advertising. Some offer great benefits to advertisers, others amazing experiences for viewers. I offer advice to many companies as to where best to pitch their services and have decided to write this blog series to showcase the transformative power of ad tech.

Shazam – All things searchable by phone?

When it comes to making TV ads interactive, you cannot start anywhere else than with Shazam. Famous for many interactive ads on UK TV over the last 3-4 years, Shazam has opened completely new opportunities to advertisers.

Shazam has even been around from before apps were even invented. At the start, you needed to call a number to let Shazam listen to a song, then they would text you the title and performer. How apps have changed that!

Over the last few months Shazam has added visual recognition to the app and showcased this at London King’s Cross in December. BMW set up temporary shop at the station with pictures of all BMW models, so that you could use your Shazam app to take a picture of a car, add the options and place the order. It wasn’t clear whether home delivery was included…

The future for apps like Shazam is to make anything audio or visual searchable on your phone. Whether this will happen with one app owning the whole space or making technology available to other apps remains to be seen. Not having to compete with other apps in the app store and instead offering a great white labelled service might be an interesting alternative to the current situation.

One of the main challenges is that viewers wanting to Shazam an ad need to be quick off the mark once the ad is on TV, in order to tag it before it is over. I think this is the main challenge stopping Shazam from growing bigger in the TV market. If I could be in my favourite app during the ad break and still get the Shazam experience – imagine the reach advertisers could get…

There is no question about the influence Shazam has had in driving the use and understanding of second screen as a concept. It has helped define a whole new generation of innovation, but even so, no one else has come close to Shazam’s importance in the market. Having achieved that position, it will be interesting to see how Shazam will be able to build its already impressive reach.

So how does compliance work for Shazamable ads? We will simply check the call to action, in a way very similar to urls in ads – easy.